Karl Popper Quotes

Fortunately for serious minds, a bias recognized is a bias sterilized.

There is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out.

The scientist is a lover of truth for the very love of truth itself, wherever it may lead.

Intellectuals are people who believe that ideas are of more importance than values. That is to say, their own ideas and other people's values.

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

To be intellectual does not require one to be alienated and oppositional.

Sometimes I like to list the strongest arguments I can find to support a point of view I think is wrong. When I have them before me, I am up against a real opponent rather than a hypothetical one that is an easy target for me to hit.

A philosopher goes where the truth leads and has no patience with mere emotion.

We're too smart to know there aren't easy answers. But we're not dumb enough to accept that there aren't better answers.

The effective thinker treats arrogance as the major sin of thinking.

Would that well-thinking people should be replaced by thinking ones.

With science and reason throughout history, what people believed turned out to be false. So I like to keep an open mind to all perspectives and learn and become more fully realised as a person. I just feel we're never going to know what the full picture is.

Think your own thoughts.

When blithe to argument I come, Though armed with facts, and merry, May Providence protect me from The fool as adversary, Whose mind to him a kingdom is Where reason lacks dominion, Who calls conviction prejudice And prejudice opinion.

The interesting thing is always to see if you can find a fact that will change your mind about something, to test and see if you can.

I know too much to be a sceptic and too little to be a dogmatist.

I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.

Empathy has some unfortunate features - it is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate. We're often at our best when we're smart enough not to rely on it.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.

I like to regard myself as someone who's capable of critical thought, that is to say, who can evaluate claims.

The problem with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than their minds.

My brain is open.

The main battle is to make people realise that doubt is important. Doubt is good. The 'don't know' answer sometimes is the box you should tick, and it's about not being scared about that fact. Even the greatest minds don't know everything.

It's actually very surprising how little we think about the quality of our decision-making and how we could improve it. How absent decision-making classes are from educational curricula. How little we think about how it is we think.

I only surround myself with people who are intellectually stimulating.